About TPOT 

TPOT is the website for the Metadata Services program of the UC San Diego Library.

Purpose:

1. To facilitate the work of Metadata Services staff by providing practical and relevant tools and information, allowing them to access information quickly and easily;
2. To serve as a source of information about the UC San Diego Library's cataloging and metadata practices for other units within the organization;
3. To share information and practices with the community at large, because of our long-standing commitment to cooperative cataloging and record sharing, and because of the need for broad sharing of metadata standards and practices.

History:

TPOT began in January 1994 under the leadership of the then Catalog Department.  It expanded and continued the documentation from an earlier GOPHER site, and contained information pertaining to acquisitions, cataloging and preservation activities in the UCSD Libraries. Thus TPOT started as an acronym for Technical Processing Online Tools. When new options for library websites became available in 2007, TPOT narrowed its focus to only cataloging and metadata support (websites for the other technical services departments moved to the Library's intranet). Because it was widely and well known, we decided to keep the acronym, but stopped using the words that formed the acronym. In June 2012, TPOT moved to a new content management system, which brought a new look-and-feel, new navigation, and a new backend organizational structure.  At that time, archived documents were moved to a local private drive and other private documents (such as minutes) were moved to the Library's intranet. TPOT is currently managed by the Metadata Services program and the TPOT Managing Editors.